Devotion: The Beauty in Between (Beautiful Series book 4.5) Read Free Page A

we could go back in time at least one hour, so I could make sure the bloody front door was locked before I went and seduced my fiancé.
    “How bad is it?” I ask, knowing his mother’s pencha nt for dramatic flair.
    “She’ll get over it. She always does,” he assures me.
    “I won’t get over it. I’m so embarrassed, Theo. I just want to crawl under a rock and stay there. How am I ever going to sit across a dinner table from her again?”
    His chest starts bouncing as a chuckle erupts from within.
    “It’s not funny, Theo!”
    “Babe. My mother just saw me come in your face. It’s pretty fucking funny.”
    I cover my face with my hands. “Oh god! Don’t remind me!” I moan.
    His arms tighten around me. “Hey, it serves her right for walking into our house uninvited.”
    “Note to self – always lock the front door…So, I guess she knows I’m living here now?”
    “Yep,” he confirms gravely.
    “Bloody hell,” I moan, running my hand over the top of my head in agitation. “What the hell was she doing here? She never drops in unannounced.”
    “I have no idea. We were too busy yelling at each other to find out why she really was here. But don’t worry. It’ll all blow over.”
    “Yeah , but when? Remember what happened when Marcus and Lisa eloped? She lost her shit and wore black for months! All that muttering and crossing herself around them – what is she going to do after witnessing that ?”
    This reaction may seem a little ridiculous. After all, Theo and I are adults. We’re engaged, and we’ve been touring the country, and the world, with our band for a few years now. And, we’ve been living together for most of those years. It’s just that Theo’s mother doesn’t know that part. Up until today, she still thought we were living separately.
    Here’s the thing . Theo comes from a very religious Italian family. His mother, especially, is very big on tradition and would have an absolute fit if she had realised we were living together before we were married. As far as she is concerned, her boys are ‘good catholic boys’ and they should marry ‘good catholic girls’.
    The cathol ic girl part was the one thing I had right. Although I’m not practising, I am at least christened and went through all of my communion and what not when I was young. But, the ‘good’ part… well, that was already debatable - but now, I’ve completely lost any sort of respect I had in Mrs Bailey’s eyes.
    Mrs Bailey. That’s right, I still call her ‘Mrs Bailey’ as if I’m a child coming over to her house to play after school. But what can I say? The woman makes me nervous as hell. When she’s upset, she mutters things in Italian that sound like curses and when her sons disappoint her… words can’t even describe what it’s like when that happens. Drama – she just radiates so much drama!
    From what I’ve been told, when Theo went through his Goth phase, she saw him once and lost her shit, claiming that he was breaking her heart because he was courting the devil. She made his life so difficult, that from then on he hid it from her so as not to upset her, but still be the person he wanted to be.
    It’s hard to know what will set her off though. When Theo’s younger brother, Marcus, made himself an Internet sensation by ruining our band’s Melbourne gig a few years ago, she barely bat an eyelid. Then, while he took off and toured the world for a couple of years without making any contact with a single one of us, once again, she was fine. “He just so busy,” she’d say in her thick accent. It used to infuriate me because I just knew that if Theo had done that, both Mr and Mrs Bailey would be shaking their heads in disappointment and claiming that he didn’t care about them anymore.
    But I guess that’s the difference with the Bailey brothers – Theo was always the dependable one and Marcus was always the one with stars in his eyes. They expected more from Theo than they ever did from